Killer’s ‘oath’ vs. Gazette
‘Like to kill’ journo
The man accused of fatally shooting five staffers in the Capital Gazette newsroom warned in court papers years ago that he had “sworn a legal oath” to kill one of its reporters.
Acting as his own lawyer in one of his several failed defamation lawsuits against the Annapolis newspaper, Jarrod Ramos wrote about himself in a 2014 legal complaint: “Plaintiff has sworn a legal oath he would like to kill [reporter Eric Thomas] Hartley, and he still would,” ABC News reported.
Hartley had left the Annapolis, Md., newsroom by the time Ramos, 38, allegedly walked into the centuriesold paper’s office with a pump-action shotgun Thursday and began his slaughter.
Ramos was able to legally buy the gun about a year ago, according to The Baltimore Sun — despite years of making threats online against the paper and even putting the direct threat on the record in court.
At one point in 2013, threats that Ramos made on Twitter against then-Gazette Editor Thomas Marquardt got the attention of Anne Arundel County Police.
But a detective closed the investigation after determining he “did not believe Mr. Ramos was a threat to employees” at the paper because he hadn’t sent “direct, threatening correspondence,” according to Anne Arundel County Police Chief Timothy Altomare.
In 2015, Ramos wrote more disturbing tweets about Ga- zette journalists, including one in which he said he wanted the paper to stop publishing — but “it would be nicer” to see two of its reporters “cease breathing.”
Marquardt — whom Ramos had also unsuccessfully sued — was no longer working at the paper when the gunman launched his attack.
The paper’s police reporter, Phil Davis, recalled how he just happened to be texting the Annapolis Police Department’s public-information officer right before all hell broke loose.
“So I started to text her as quickly as I could what was happening,” he told CNN on Sunday, adding that the officer thought he was joking.
“And then, once she grasped it, she said she had called 911 and told me to stay as low as I could.”
Education and US Naval Academy beat reporter Rachael Pacella told CNN that as she took cover in the office, she thought, “What could we have done to make people hate us so much? Why do people hate the media? What could we have done to deserve this?”